Can you Install Adobe Flash Player on Firefox for Android in 2021?

Adobe Flash Player – also known as Shockwave Flash – has accompanied millions of users on the Internet throughout the years. The first word that usually comes to mind for many people when talking about Flash is “web games“: this plugin, in fact, has always been a staple service for viewing and executing interactive, multimedia content. But it was also able to play rich Internet applications in general, animations and to stream audio and video.

A brief story about how Flash Player lost leadership

Over time, as the web evolved, the Flash format became an essential part of any web activity. But as time went by, open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly started providing the Internet community with many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins – Flash included – pioneered, and, just like that, these other tools became a viable, preferred alternative for displaying content on the web.

Helper apps evolved to become plugins, with many of these plugin capabilities getting incorporated into open web standards. To this day, most browser vendors have integrated capabilities once provided only by plugins directly into browsers.

This progress in web technologies has now led to Flash’s inexorable demise. The software’s end-of-life finally came about on December 31st of 2020, after being announced 3 years prior. From that date onward, Adobe stopped updating and distributing the Flash Player, and started encouraging content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to the aforementioned new open formats.

The reasons behind Flash’s killing are therefore linked to its obsoleteness. This defect caused the plugin to be increasingly criticized for its performance, consumption of battery on mobile devices, the number of security vulnerabilities that had been discovered in the software, and its closed platform nature.

But is Flash Player really no more? Or is there a way to bring it back for those who are feeling extra nostalgic about their favorite, out-of-date web games? Actually, there is: let’s find out how we can keep playing Flash content even in 2021!

Keep playing Flash content on any browser and OS with Ruffle!

Viewing and executing Flash content nowadays is possible thanks to Ruffle. Ruffle is a Flash Player emulator written in Rust that runs natively on all modern operating systems as a standalone application, and on all modern browsers through the use of WebAssembly. By leveraging the safety of the modern browser sandbox and the memory safety guarantees of Rust, Ruffle is able to avoid all the security shortcomings that made Flash infamous. Another great thing is that Ruffle is available on the following browsers on iOS and Android mobile devices: Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

Once the Ruffle extension is installed, you’ll be able to seamlessly play Flash content on any webpage, and no extra configuration is required. It works by simply detecting all existing Flash content on a website, content that gets automatically “polyfilled” into a Ruffle player.

The Ruffle project was born as a means to help preserve the plethora of content that is no longer accessible due to the inability of running Flash Player after the software’s official death. Thus, Ruffle is an amazing tool that plays a significant part in keeping this piece of Internet history – that of old Flash videogames – alive.

Check out Ruffle’s official website to get started right away!

Sources: Adobe Blog, Ruffle